


Something worth saving

by a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Ableism, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 15:16:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1715237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words/pseuds/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt:<br/>"What if Steve really does get punched on purpose like it's a kind of self harm thing because he thinks secretly that he deserves it?"</p><p>Which is pretty much exactly what this fic is.</p><p>Rated M for violence and a scene where Steve is scared that another character will rape him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something worth saving

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt on tumblr:  
> http://youdonthaveoneofthosedoyou.tumblr.com/post/87309250825/yeah-but-what-if-steve-really-does-get-punched-on

_Sometimes I think you like getting punched._

It’s not quite true, not really. Steve doesn’t  _like_  getting punched.

He deserves it.

Steve is a near constant invalid, and if he can’t work and he can’t save his mother and he can’t pay his way without Bucky’s help, then what is he, if he can’t even fight for what he believes in? The ledger of Steve’s life is dripping red ink with debts he can’t pay, shouldered instead by friends, a mother who dedicated her life to him, a father who died to save Europe who he can never live up to, and Bucky, who doesn’t even expect him to pay anything back. Doesn’t want him to.

What’s a chipped back molar for his chance to have a go at fighting the good fight?

He likes being rescued, and for that he feels even worse. It’s the opposite of the shame of being defended by his mother from the other little boys in the street, where he’d tell her it was all a game and to leave it alone and she would ignore him and chase them off with a broom. He luxuriates in Bucky caring about him, wanting to protect him. He knows it’s queer, knows it’s wrong and that Bucky would hate it. Wants to kiss Bucky and wants to not want him, and wants to be the one to replace all of his dames.

___________________________

“He’s pretty,” He’d once said to his mother, when she’d asked him why he drew Bucky so often.

“You ought to beat that out of him,” Said his aunt. Sarah never did. Perhaps Steve is only making up for lost time.

___________________________

Bucky knows that if Steve is late, he’d best check the men’s room and the alley round the back, knows Steve has a weak left hook and a strong tendency to land himself trouble.

What Bucky and Steve don’t know is how easy it is for a pattern to become an addiction, a dependency. A school-yard fight becomes a brawl in the street, and every time, Bucky somehow manages to get him out of it – even when it’s six against two, Bucky takes him home in one piece (mostly), de-escalates and Steve follows his lead because he’ll risk his own skin but he won’t risk Bucky’s.

The fights dry out with the young men. By 1944, they’re in short supply; patriotism is all the rage and the new favourite enemy isn’t the guy with the lisp next door, it’s the Nazis. What’s Steve going to say to that?  _Have a little respect for Hitler, you don’t know him personally_?

So the fights aren’t there and the blows stop coming, but Steve’s self loathing is every bit as powerful. Bucky was put on the conscription role back in 1940 and in ‘44 he’s finally drafted, finally taken in for training. Steve is not. Bucky is in barracks for just eight weeks training, and Steve remembers with relief the outcry when they’d tried to reduce it to five. He doesn’t think anyone could turn Buck from his defender into an army sergeant in five weeks. Maybe cannon fodder, though.

For now, he’s drowning in his own jealousy and his desire and there’s nothing like a punch in the gut to cure your self misery and your queer thoughts about your best friend.

It’s not the guy at the cinema, actually, because those are few and far between and so Steve introduces himself into a whole new underworld to meet what he thinks is a need.

And what a need it is. Neil Shaw is an old not-friend who’s outgrown such things as pulling Steve’s pants down in the street, aided by a broken tooth from Bucky no doubt. Neil Shaw has friends though, rich men friends who haven’t been shipped out and who have strange and oddly specific tastes.

It doesn’t much help Steve’s plight to outgrow his conscience, being the punch bag of anonymous, predatory queer men, and he  _knows_ , he knows it’s stupid, should’ve realised it was stupid all along, but now he’s locked into it.

___________________________

The first time is the second most terrifying, so much so that he’s glad he pissed before he left the house and hasn’t drunk anything all day. He doesn’t find out the man’s name, tries to look tough.

“No fucking,” He says, because even though Steve doesn’t often swear he needs to be as aggressive as he can, as though that can protect him.

The man grunts at him and elbows him in the chest, hard enough to set him choking and gasping. Steve stands up, unwilling to be passive, but that’s not how it works with Shaw’s friends, and a left hook that is stronger than all the punches he’s ever landed knocks him to the floor again. There’s blood in his mouth, and it’s good in a horrible way. He’s relieved, and he’s locked in a room with a man he’s never met who seems determined to destroy his face in the fifteen minutes they have left.

He curls up on the gritty bare floorboards of the man’s grotty apartment with his arms up over his head for protection, and the man kicks his hand so hard he passes out

For the first time Steve is glad his mother is dead and his best (only) friend away for the next seven weeks. Two black eyes, a nose that might be broken, a chipped incisor and three dislocated fingers. His rib might be broken, but there’s no way to tell.

The man leaves him money, and Steve wonders if he has become a prostitute for fruits with anger issues.

After that, he asks that they don’t mark his face.

___________________________

The first most terrifying, the one where he really thinks,  _this is it_ , is the third time, when Steve takes his bruised body to an empty house outside town and there are two men waiting for him. He was only expecting one. Lack of self-preservation stops him from saying so, stops him from running. His asthma would stop him anyway. He’s in too deep to protest when they belt his wrists together and hand him by them from a hook on the ceiling. The tips of his toes just brush the floor.

The men are big, the smaller easily twice his size, the other guy must be pushing 300 pounds of pure muscle. Dockworkers, he thinks, or professional muscle men.

They rip his clothes off, shirt and pants and vest and underwear, ruin the lot of it, and he freezes, not daring to breathe in case he has an asthma attack, certain he’s to be raped and beaten to death. They’ve both wrapped their fists he’s noticed, and he has no doubts as to why.

They give him ten bucks for the luxury of breaking his body and leave him crying and naked and without clothes and with endless bruises over everywhere but his face on the floor of the downstairs landing.

It seems they’ve beaten everything out of him except his weakness and his feelings for Buck. 

___________________________

In eight weeks, Bucky is back, cocky and gorgeous in his brand new uniform, and Steve is subsumed by a cocktail of envy and poorly disguised attraction, because this is everything he wants to be and everything Bucky should be.

He realises too late that war is the furthest thing from “should be” for Bucky.

When Bucky has a week of leave before he’s assigned a position and shipped off, Steve has to step back from it. This has to be about Bucky, even if his ribs still hurt from his last beating and his balls still have an odd bluish sheen to them, where one of those men had punched him repeatedly. He doesn’t limp.

“Sometimes I think you like getting punched,” Bucky tells him, once he’s saved him one last time.

“I had him on the ropes.” Steve feels a twinge in his chest, a twinge that might be called  _you weren’t there to save me for all these things that I’ve done to myself,_  because if the last two months have taught him anything it’s that the beatings only work if someone comes to prove he’s didn’t really deserve it at the end.

Bucky flings an arm around his shoulders, and Steve doesn’t wince even though his left shoulder is still slightly swollen from being dislocated three weeks prior.

He wants to take Bucky home and cry into his arms and have him fix it, to have Bucky hold him down and save him from himself, and then roll over and let Steve have his queer pervert ways with him.

He can’t though, because Bucky’s found them girls and a place to go for the evening, and it’s Bucky’s last evening so he gets to choose even when all Steve wants is to have him to himself.

They’re going to the future.

Bucky spends his last night state-side in the arms of some dame and Steve has never been more jealous in his life.

___________________________

The next time Steve sees him, it’s Bucky who needs saving.

___________________________

The irony isn’t lost on Steve, when the next time someone beats  _him_  up for sheer brutality, it’s Bucky’s metal fist breaking his cheekbone, Bucky splitting his lip and crushing his ribcage. When it’s Bucky pulling him from the water.

___________________________

“You always did save me,” Steve says, some months later, unprompted except by memory.

Bucky or what’s left of him, is confused but compliant. “From what?”

“From myself and all those stupid fights I got myself into.” He tries not to sound bitter. Should be grateful. He always was before, sort of.

There’s a flicker of recognition on Bucky’s face, and he lands a rare pat on Steve’s back, squeezing his shoulder firmly, and flashes him an equally rare smile. “Course I did. There never was anyone more worth saving than you, Steve.”


End file.
